Mount Olympus

The gates above the mountain

Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in Greece, and in Greek myth it is the home of the gods. Yet the two early Greek epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, do not describe it in one way.

In the fifth book of the Iliad, the goddess Hera whips her horses toward the gates of heaven. The gates groan open on their own hinges. The Hours keep them, and they are entrusted with “great heaven and Olympus” together, as if the two were one country.

A few lines later Hera and the goddess Athena find Zeus. He is sitting apart from the other gods “on the topmost peak of many-ridged Olympus” (Iliad 5.749-754). Here Olympus is a mountain like any other, with a summit and ridges.

A seat beyond the weather

The Odyssey describes a different Olympus. Athena withdraws there, to a seat “neither shaken by winds nor ever wet with rain”. Snow never falls there, and a white radiance hangs over a cloudless sky (Odyssey 6.42-46). That weather fits no mountain the Greeks had ever climbed, and least of all the one the name usually meant.

The poems do not force these places into one map. A god may sit on a real summit in one scene. In another, a god may pass through guarded gates into a divine country that no weather touches. The name Olympus covers both the physical mountain and a seat beyond ordinary weather.

How many gods, and which

Plato’s Phaedrus gives a number for the gods who hold Olympus, but not a list of names. In the passage, Zeus drives out first. Behind him follows “an army of gods and spirits, arrayed in eleven squadrons”. Only the goddess Hestia stays behind in the house of the gods.

Plato calls the ones who ride out “the twelve great gods” and their “leaders”. He never says who they are (Phaedrus 247a). His passage fixes a number of seats. It does not fix who sits in them.

Alexander at Dion

At the northern foot of the mountain, on the coastal plain south of what is now Thessaloniki, the Macedonians built Dion. Dion was a sanctuary, a sacred place set apart for a god, and here the god was Zeus.

The historian Diodorus names the place directly only once. Alexander the Great, he writes, “made lavish sacrifices to the gods at Dium in Macedonia” in 334 BC, before he crossed to Asia. Alexander also held nine days of contests for Zeus and the Muses. Diodorus says these games had been begun by an earlier king: “Archelaüs, one of his predecessors, had instituted” them (Library of History 17.16.3-4).

Philip II and the Olympian festival

A generation earlier, in 348 BC, Diodorus records the Macedonian king Philip II holding what looks like the same rite. It came after the fall of the city of Olynthus. Diodorus calls it “the Olympian festival to the gods… with magnificent sacrifices”, held with games. He does not name the place.

Modern editors of Diodorus identify it as the same festival at Dium. They base this on an inscription that reads “into the sanctuary of the Olympian Zeus” (16.55.1). On that reading, Philip II and Alexander both offered sacrifice at the same festival, at the foot of the gods’ mountain.

What the stones say

Two more inscriptions were found in the sanctuary’s own precinct, the ground set aside for the god. One is a letter of the later king Philip V that settles a dispute over a boundary. The other is a city decree of the late fourth century BC.

Both order that their own text be set up “in the sanctuary of Olympian Zeus”. These inscriptions are what identify the ground at all. No large-scale excavation has cleared it. The identification rests on what the stones themselves say about where they were meant to stand.

What Dion’s name says

Dion carries the old Greek word dios, “heavenly”. The playwright Aeschylus already uses the same word for the plans of Zeus (Prometheus Bound 619). A Macedonian who said the town’s name was already saying whose ground it was.

The inscriptions mean there is no need to guess at a temple from the place name alone. They name the precinct as that of Olympian Zeus, and Diodorus records rulers sacrificing at its festival. In poetry, Olympus stays both a mountain and a divine country. At Dion, Macedon gave the mountain’s Zeus a sanctuary on the ground beneath it.